My 'TED-style' Talk

Seven minutes to talk about Product Validation

On Thursday I was one of seven people invited to do a ‘TED-style’ talk, for the networking group, Helm. We had seven minutes each to deliver something that we hoped the audience would find useful. Seven minutes isn’t very long to try and get an idea over in a meaningful way.

I ended up giving my talk the title: ‘Idea Validation Before You Write a Line of Code’. It’s a topic I talk about here quite often. But given it’s a nice condensed version, I thought I’d share it for this week’s newsletter. Here we go:

As entrepreneurs, we can’t help ourselves. We see an opportunity, a way to add some additional revenue or maybe invent the next big thing, and we take it. It’s in our DNA. We’re optimists. We believe in possibilities. And we have to be—because without that belief, we’d never take the risks that starting a business demands.

But there’s something that a lot of us, including me, have been guilty of. We don’t always check our homework before diving in. Instead, we trust our gut. We say, “This idea is brilliant—it has to work.” We fall in love with the idea, we convince our team, we build excitement, and suddenly the thought of actually stopping to validate it feels like an unnecessary delay, maybe even a lack of confidence. It’s almost as if questioning our idea could jinx it.

And that’s exactly how I wasted an enormous amount of time and money.

Over the years, I’ve launched 15 different products. Four of them did okay and were eventually sold to different companies. One of them went on to be, by most assessments, a runaway success. But that leaves ten. Ten products that we spent time and money on—only to see them go absolutely nowhere.

One of them, in particular, was a disaster. We spent over a year building it. And in that time, we didn’t validate a single assumption. Not one. We never spoke to a customer. We missed deadline after deadline, which drained morale across the whole team. Then, the big day came. We launched it. And… nothing. Nobody wanted it. It was technically brilliant, but it just didn’t solve a problem that customers needed. After all that effort, it just got left on the shelf. Months of work, tens—maybe even hundreds—of thousands of pounds wasted. And the worst part? It was completely avoidable.

This isn’t just my experience. I’ve seen this play out with so many founders. And when people do attempt validation, they often do it after they’ve already built something. They create an MVP, a prototype, and they take it to customers saying, “What do you think?” But here’s the problem: if you show people your MVP, they’ll almost always tell you it’s nice. It’s human nature. They don’t want to crush your dreams. But that doesn’t mean they’ll buy it. And that’s what really matters.

So how do you validate an idea before you write a single line of code? Here are five questions I use when people ask me to help them work out whether their idea has legs.

1. Does your product make money, save money, or keep your customer compliant?

If the answer is no, you’re probably in trouble. Because if your product is just “nice to have,” it’s not likely to scale. And when I say it needs to make or save money, I mean significantly. If your product is just slightly cheaper than something else, that’s not enough. It has to make a meaningful difference.

2. Does this problem keep your customer awake at night?

If not, they won’t pay for a solution. Imagine, say, an AI tool that helps people send witty email replies. Fun, sure. But no CEO is losing sleep over their emails not being funny enough.

By the way it doesn’t have to directly solve a problem: it could be something that unlocks a problem.

In my case, at my agency I was worried that people didn’t care how much we billed each month and that was impacting our revenue growth (the thing that was keeping me awake at night). I thought that if we could show our sales in real time on a public screen in our office it would motivate people and we’d make more money. We looked around and couldn’t find a tool that would allow us to do that and so we created ScreenCloud.

3. What are customers currently doing to solve this problem?

There are three possible answers: A) Nothing B) A DIY, cobbled-together solution C) Using another product

If customers are doing nothing, that’s a red flag. If it’s really a problem, surely they would have tried something. If they’re hacking together a solution with spreadsheets and Zapier, that’s a strong signal—because it means they see the value, but they haven’t found the right tool yet. And if they’re using another product, that’s also a good sign—though you’ll need a clear strategy to ensure you have differentiated value.

4. Do the unit economics stack up?

I once started an online estate agency as a joint venture. We raised money, built the platform, and realized that the only way to attract customers at scale was through TV ads. The problem? It cost us about £800 to acquire each customer, but their gross lifetime value was less than that. A sustainable business typically needs an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1. Ours was 0.25:1. In other words, impossible. You don’t need a deep financial model to check this—just a quick sanity check on acquisition cost vs. customer value can save you from disaster.

5. If you really want to know, just ask.

The amazing thing is that you can find out fairly quickly and pretty much for free just by asking a sample of your prospective customers. And I don’t mean, “Ask people if they like your idea.” Because they will lie to you. Not maliciously, but because people hate giving negative feedback. Rob Fitzpatrick, in The Mom Test, explains that the worst mistake entrepreneurs make is fishing for compliments instead of asking the right questions. Instead of saying, “Would you use my idea?” ask:

• What’s the biggest challenge you’re facing right now in your business?

• How do you currently solve it?

• Have you tried anything else? What happened?

And if you really want to get useful answers, ask the three questions you don’t want to hear the answers to. The ones that could kill your idea. Because if you find out early that your idea won’t work, you’ve saved yourself months or years of wasted effort.

So here’s my challenge to you: before you write a single line of code, go and validate your idea properly. Don’t fall in love with it yet. Test it, question it, challenge it. And if it survives, then you build it. Because that’s how you discover insights you may never have realised and save time and money in the process.

Thank you.